My one liner: If Huckleberry Finn gave you pleasure as a child, this collection of letters and notes of Mark Twain, will give you as much pleasure now. 

Take profits on your stock positions when they have gone up.  Not all new technologies are great investments.  Heed the advice of technical experts. Due diligence is no substitute for “friends and family”.  Some basic investment propositions that are as true today as they were 150 years ago. And Mark Twain was a pretty disastrous investor. 

Some time in the 1860s he took a stock tip from his acquaintance Mr Camp, “a bold man who was always making big fortunes in ingenious speculations and losing them again in the course of six months by other speculative ingenuities”.  The tip was to buy Hale and Norcross, and he purchased 50 shares at $300 a share, putting in 20% himself, with the rest on margin.  He also persuaded his brother, Orion, to come in for half the amount, and awaited the cheque.  Predictably enough, Hale and Norton went through the roof hitting $6,000 per share.  Inexplicably Twain waited for Orion’s money before selling out.  Predictably enough Hale and Norton came crashing back down.  Blasted through the margin and into Twain’s equity, and “at last when I got out I was badly crippled”.  Only later does Twain find out that his brother had sent the money in gold (rather than a cheque which any “normal human being” would have done) to a nearby hotel, and the clerk had deposited it in the safe and forgotten about it.

Then there was the foray into patents. Twain acquires a patent for $15,000 from an “old and particular” friend who had neglected to mention to him that it was worthless. The deal was that Twain would pay a further $500 per month to the friend who would do the manufacturing and selling.  In his colourful humour Twain tells us “that raven flew out of the Ark regularly every thirty days and the dove didn’t report for duty.”

Or the steam engine, which “another old friend” told him would get out 99% of all the steam that was in a pound of coal.  He takes the advice of a coal and steam expert who shows him using a book of “figures that made me drunk and dizzy” which the machine could not come within 90% of the claimed steam release.  Despite the expert advice Twain proceeds and engages the inventor because “maybe the book was mistaken”.  Five thousand dollars later, the inventor comes up with a machine which saved 1% steam, but “you could do it with a teakettle.”  Undeterred, Twain now fancies himself as an enthusiast on steam and takes some stock in a Hartford company which is a making a new kind of steam pulley.  “That pulley pulled thirty two thousand dollars out of my pocket in sixteen months, then went to pieces.”

These are just a few anecdotes from a collection of letters and notes which constitute the autobiography of Mark Twain (real name Samuel Clemens), put together from 1870 up to his death in 1910, and edited into a book by Charles Neider in 1959.  He is not afraid to admit his follies, and he is not afraid to admit his vanity:

“This Autobiography of mine is a mirror and I am looking at myself in it all the time.  Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back...and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation I set these things down in my Autobiography.”

We learn that Twain was a highly proficient billiards and pool player. And with our modern world obsessed with level playing fields and standardised rules he gives us the story of the billiards table at Jackass Gulch, a dilapidated former mining town which the gold deposits were now exhausted. The saloon is of a “ruined and rickety character struggling for life, but doomed.”  And the pool table reflected this, with chipped balls, the cloth darned and patched, the table’s surface undulated with headless cues that “had the curve of a parenthesis”.  And Twain postulates that it would be much more entertaining to have the great champions who grace the competition tables of Madison Square pit their skills against Texas Tom of Jackass Gulch on the bad billiard outfit, where adjustments have to be made for all of  the table’s faults and inaccuracies.  Possibly some life lessons there.

And how did Twain conceive of Finn, the reckless boyhood adventurer ? Well there must have been something of the Twain about Finn.  An example comes from 1845 when a measles epidemic is claiming the lives of many children in Mark Twain’s home town.  The ten-year old Twain is so engulfed with impatience as to whether he will succumb to the epidemic that he forces the issue by deliberately sneaking into the house of his measles-infected friend and jumping into bed next to him.  Needless to say he contracts that disease, but survives by a whisker.

The book is a fascinating insight into an America which is transforming from Emerging Market to Global Superpower (“Steadily, continuously, persistently, we are Americanizing Europe, and all in good time we shall get the job perfected”).  Twain was a supporter of equality, though his language reflects what was culturally acceptable and normal in a country where slavery was still prevalent.  And he was active all the way to his death.  Although one suspects that if the death of his wife in Italy 1904 was a near-fatal emotional blow to him, then the loss of his daughter Jean in 1909 probably sapped his remaining will to live.

This is the Wikipedia link for the book.

Simon Winchester: Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China (2008)

My one liner: How a foremost biochemist became a foremost sinologist, and single-handedly created the Western world’s understanding of China, long before it became fashionable.

 15 May 1948. “Science and Civilisation in China.  Preliminary plan of a
book by Joseph Needham, FRS.  It will be addressed, not to sinologists, nor to the general public, but to all educated people, whether themselves scientists or not, who are interested in the history of science, scientific thought, and technology, in relation to the general history of civilisation, and especially the comparative development of Asia and Europe”.

Needham, a fellow, and subsequently, Master of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, went on to write Science and Civilisation in China, which is widely considered the foremost work on scientific development in China.  He himself wrote 15 volumes over the next 4-5 decades of his life, and further volumes have continued to be published following his death in 1995. Simon Winchester's book traces the life story of Needham and the path by which his work came into being.  And through that journey we learn much ourselves about a civilisation that for long periods of history has been far more scientifically advanced than the West. Far more, arguably, than wading through the blogs, commentaries and predictions spewed out by some of today’s “China watchers”.
 
And just as importantly we learn something about this remarkable man, and the potential of what can be achieved by human endeavour, application, determination, and an openness to foreign ideas and cultures. Needham was after all a specialist in biochemistry. In 1939, before he was 40, he published a book on morphogenesis which was acclaimed by a Harvard reviewer as “destined to take its place as one of the most truly epoch-making books in biology since Charles Darwin.” 
 
A committed socialist throughout his life, Needham was selected by Britain’s academic community at the start of the Second World War to go to China and assist with a programme of reconstruction of China’s academic and scientific institutions, following the devastation wrought by war with Japan. And from there he didn’t look back. Already familiar with the Chinese written language through lessons from his friend / colleague / lover / concubine / and eventually in 1989, wife, Lu Gwei-djen, Needham embarked on a relentless pursuit of knowledge about China. 
 
The appendix of Winchester’s book lists “Chinese Inventions and Discoveries with Dates of First Mention”.  Here are a few: Algorithm for extraction of square roots and cube roots: 1 AD; Ball Bearings 2AD; Blood, distinction between arterial and venous: 2BC; Compass, magnetic for navigation: 1111AD; Grid technique, quantitative, used in cartography: 130 AD; Melodic composition 475 AD; Numerical equations of higher order, solution of 13C
AD; Pi, accurate estimation: 3AD; Printing, with woodblocks: 7C AD; Rocket arrow launchers: 1367 AD; Soybean, fermented: 200 BC; Watermills, geared: 3C AD.  As Needham said: “The mere fact of seeing them listed brings home to one the astonishing inventiveness of the Chinese people”.

Written in the style of a novel, Winchester's book puts us into Needham’s shoes as he travels to the  what were at the time some of the most remote parts of the planet, for example his Silk Road journey, in a truck which was a converted Chevrolet ambulance.  As he visits academic institutions, government offices and archeological sites he assembles a collection of original papers and documents detailing every facet of Chinese scientific and technological progress, and on returning to Cambridge after the War, proceeds to catalogue these, leading to the 1948 book plan.

There is of course his personal life, sympathetically and empathetically described.   His devoted wife Dorothy, who is accepting of the open nature of their marriage, is a friend and confidante of Gwei-djen. Needham’s political views, bordering on communism in an age of McCarthyism, and his sympathies with Mao’s regime, lead to frequent run-ins with the political and academic establishment.  

But we are left with the enduring notion that the pure pursuit of knowledge, and the desire to open that knowledge to society at large through painstaking effort, prevails in the end.  That a scientist trained in the supposedly physical precision of Western enquiry can be so open to the ancient scientific traditions as the genesis of his work, is a salutary lesson for all of us:

“Heaven has five elements, first Wood, second Fire, third Earth, fourth Metal, and fifth Water. Wood comes first in the cycle of the five elements and water comes last, earth being in the middle.  This is the order which heaven has made.  Wood produces fire, fire produces earth (ie. as ashes), earth produces
metal (ie. as ores), metal produces water (either because molten metal was
considered aqueous, or more probably because of the ritual practice of
collecting dew on metal mirrors exposed at night time), and water produces wood (for woody plants require water).  This is their ‘father and son’relation. Wood dwells on the left, metal on the right, fire in front and water behind, with earth in the centre. This too is the father and son order, each receiving the other in turn...As transmitters they are fathers, as receivers they are sons. There is an unvarying dependence of the sons on the fathers, and a direction from the fathers to the sons. Such is the Dao of heaven” From Chun Qiu Fan Lu, by  Dong Zhongshu 135 BC. Quoted by Needham in Vol II, 1956.

Here is the wikipedia link to the author.  There is no wikipedia entry for the book.

Steven Strange & Jack Zupko (Eds) – Stoicism: Traditions and Tranformations (2004)

My one liner: A collection of articles which traces the development of the Stoic school from its origins through to it contemporary application. The early articles are seriously heavy going, but there are some real gems in here for the lay reader who perseveres.

Since I come to most of my reading as a non-specialist, I feel comfortable suggesting this book to the lay reader, even though some of the articles (particularly the first few) will be 75% impenetrable (although those with some school level Latin or Greek may be able to get that down to 50%). Indeed it gave me comfort when I read the opening paragraphs of the introduction, which says that in compiling the book there was a possible “High Road” approach and a “Low Road” approach, the latter “would focus less on questions that interested ancient Stoics and more on broader tendencies and trends, looking at the way Stoic doctrines were employed in new settings and against different competitors.”  The editors have decided to take the low road. And therefore the reader can equally do likewise.

 To that end, if you need a primer on Stoic philosophy, start, as always, with the Wikipedia entry on Stoicism.  No shame there.  
  
How can these be translated into our contemporary lifestyles, if at all ? The final essay in the collection is by Lawrence E. Becker on Stoic Emotion”. Becker takes us through contemporary developments and attempts to demonstrate that ancient Stoic principles can be applied to our modern lifestyles, with a few “adjustments to the ancient doctrines”.  To take a concrete example, Becker tells us that “Neurophysiologists have identified at least four anatomically distinct structures in the “ancient” or subcortical portion of the human brain that generate affective senses –fear, rage, panic, and goal oriented desire”.  But if these are neurologically generated, how can one then apply a Stoic discipline to controlling these ? The answer is broadly that the neurological response is a “raw” one. The cognitive content that turns it into full-fledged emotion can still be controlled and tamed.  
 
Becker’s essay is interesting because it also forces us to answer some difficult questions about the “good” or value to society of emotions. The modern world seems to feed us with the view that expressing and feeling emotion is a good thing in its own right.  But this is potentially problematic, as human emotion is arguably good only insofar as humans are emotional creatures and expressing emotion allows us to communicate with other humans using emotional gestures. In other words the argument is“frustratingly circular”. Stoics, on the other hand place much less value on emotion, valuing instead the cognitive response which allows us to control our emotions so as to reduce our material attachments. In turn this also makes us think about the nature of attachment, in particular attachment to others.  A Stoic sage will love another person in a way that many would not recognise. In other words “she would not for example, become so attached to others that she literally cannot bear the prospect of losing them, any more than she would be attached to her own life in a way that made the prospect of her own death unbearable.  Nor would she wish others to love her in that way – to be desolate and helpless when she is gone, unable to bear the loss. What Stoics wish for others is what we wish for ourselves: good lives; virtuous lives; including the ability to cope with loss.”  

What this means in practice however is that a Stoic will not fit in many of the commonly prescribed behavioural norms, and will come across as aloof and detached and unemotional.

 Another interesting article in the book deals with contemporary approaches to foreign aid from developed to developing countries (Martha Nussbaum: Duties of Justice, Duties of Material Aid – Cicero’s Problematic Legacy). Its central tenet is that developed countries do not make enough financial transfers to developing countries in the form of direct aid to fight poverty, so-called Material Aid”. Nussbaum traces this allegedly moral deficiency back to a chain of political thought that goes right back to Cicero (who arguably was in a good position to comment as he wrote the work, De Officiis, whilst on the run to escape assassination from Antony and the other triumvirs in 44BC).  Cicero set out some very clear ideas of justice. His duties of justice had two parts, firstly not doing any harm to anyone unless provoked by a wrongful act, and secondly “using common things as common, private possessions as one’s own.”  So passionate was Cicero about the importance of private property that his idea of justice extended to the appropriate way to behave towards the citizens of a country conquered by war. He felt that there should be a strong commitment to institution-building, and that judicial and property-upholding institutions should transcend national boundaries.  Which sounds much like the programmes of “conditionality” (restructuring, supply-side reform,  privatisation) attached to today’s IMF and World Bank lending facilities. But where Cicero then deals a blow to Material Aid of the direct action type is that he sets out a clear hierarchy of whom justice demands that we should help.    He sets out explicit categories that justify some giving as follows: “the bond of nation and language; of the same state; of one’s relatives; various degrees of familial propinquity; and finally, one’s own home.” And just as explicitly he excludes other nations, on the basis that this is a potentially infinite cohort of recipients [infinita multido].  Now, whether you agree or not with (a) the proposition that Material Aid  is desirable in its own right and (b) that there is currently not enough wealth transfer from rich to poor, it is surely interesting and useful to understand that many of the current arrangement for trans-national relationships have their roots in ideas of justice formed 2000 years ago.
 
The book contains much else of interest, too extensive to enumerate, and still keep the review readable.  Epictetus was a Stoic who extolled the virtues of Socrates as defining everything mankind should know about a philosophical methodology for living one’s life. One of the more difficult essays describes the Socratic discourse in Epictetus’ work. Other essays lead us through the development of Stoic thought over time, from the Middle Ages, to Descartes, to Spinoza. Take what you find useful from these, and discard the rest.
 
Sten Ebbesen in his essay Where were the Stoics in the Late Middle Ages ? says: 
 
“Stoicism is not a sport for gentlemen; it requires far too much intellectual work. Most of Western history consists of gentlemen’s centuries.  But there were the couple of centuries, the fourth and the third BC, in which the ancient philosophical schools were created, and there were the three centuries from AD1100 to 1400, when medieval scholasticism flourished – centuries that produced a considerable number of tough men ready to chew their way through the tedious logical stuff that disgusts a gentleman and to make all the nice distinctions that a gentlemen can never understand but only ridicule, distinctions necessary to work out a coherent, and perhaps even consistent picture of the world.”

 If that is indeed the prize on offer, then perhaps we as gentlemen should consider whether we might want to invest a little more time and effort to look into this abit more.

There is no Wikipedia entry for this book. 

Here is the link to Google Books entry.

Amartya Sen - The Idea of Justice (2009)

My one liner: Nobel Prize winning economist.  A comprehensive survey of the great theorists' competing notions of justice, concluding that a system based on Social Realism (or taking society as it is) is preferable to constructing institutions of justice in a vacuum (“Transcendental Justice”).  
 
Framing the debate on the nature of justice, Amartya Sen provides a practical illustration, which he calls Three Children and a Flute, in the Introduction of the book: Imagine which of three children Anne, Bob and Carla should get a flute about which they are quarrelling.  Anne claims the flute on the grounds that she is the only one who knows how to play it. Bob, on the other claims the flute because he says that he is the only one of the three who is so poor that he has no toys of his own, so the flute would give him something to play with. Carla then intervenes and says that it was she who made the flute with her own painstaking labour, and just as she finishes her work “these expropriators came along to try to grab the flute away from me.”
 
It is clear that theorists of different persuasions would give the flute to different
candidate.  The economic egalitarian would give it to Bob, on the basis that poverty and inequality should be reduced.  The utilitarian hedonist “would face the hardest challenge”, but would be persuaded to give it to Anne, as her pleasure would be greatest from owning and playing it (though he would recognise that Bob’s incremental pleasure in owning it may outweigh this).  The libertarian would of course have no hesitation in awarding it to Carla.  
 
Amartya Sen’s credentials in leading us towards new theories of justice are of course impeccable, so this is a book that we have to pay attention to.  “Transcendental Justice” is the term he gives to the theories, which seek
to prescribe an institutional framework to the ideal form of justice, a sort of
build-it-and-they-will-come approach. Sen uses the work of John Rawls as his "departure point".  Sen was a student of Rawls, and whilst he acknowledge Rawls’ contribution to modern thinking on justice, he also considers it to be too rigid.  Rawls’ concept of “Justice as Fairness” is centered on a requirement of  “primordial equality”, namely that the “parties involved have no knowledge of their personal identities, or their respective vested interests, within the group as a whole.  Their representatives have to choose under this ‘veil of ignorance’”.  The primordial equality requirement then goes on through a chain of reasoning to determine the types of institutions that would be required to deliver it.

 Sen is more drawn to the “Social Realisation” school of justice. This is more concerned with justice as resulting from “actual institutions, actual behaviour and other influences.”  These concepts are to found in Smith, Condorcet, Bentham, Wollstonecraft, Marx, and Mill. In Sen’s words all of these thinkers, though having very different ideas about the demands of justice were “all involved in comparisons of societies that already existed or could feasibly
emerge”.
 
Sen is able to draw on Indian notions of justice, both from Sanskrit texts on jurisprudence and also from the Hindu epics of the Bhagavad Gita and the Mahabharata. So in Sanskrit literature, niti and nyaya both stand for justice.  Niti  signifies organisational propriety (and hence more akin to the transcendental institutionalism) and Nyaya which stands for a comprehensive
concept of realised justice.  And  he draws on examples of Eastern emperors who have come to symbolise one or the other.  Contrast the practical, societally relevant forms of justice practised by both Ashoka (a Hindu) and Akbar (a Muslim) on the one hand, with the much more prescriptive format expounded by Kautilya (a must-read by the way, if you want do a compare and contrast with Machiavelli), the latter having little faith in the ability of his  subjects to make such decisions for  themselves.
 
The arguments that Sen draws us towards are those of Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.  Smith invokes the concept of an “impartial observer” who can adjudicate on fairness given the world as it is, and who can take into account factors and opinions which are not merely present within the immediate community but which are geographically distant, but nevertheless relevant.  Sen believes that this is a more relevant way to approach justice in an interconnected world in which we grapple issues such as global terrorism and the financial crisis.

 Overall, there is as you would expect real intellectual substance in this book.  But it is highly readable, and more importantly highly relevant for how we think about what constitutes realistic justice.

Here is the Wikipedia link to the book.